An Open Letter to Tammy Baldwin: Save Postal Service

Senator Baldwin:

As I said to you at the bloggers’ meeting at the Wisconsin Democratic Convention in June, the US Postal Service is destroying its ability to serve the people of Wisconsin and the rest of the country by decimating its infrastructure: stopping some or all mail processing at plants in Madison, La Crosse, Eau Claire, Wausau, Oshkosh, as well as Kenosha, Portage, Rhinelander, Rockford IL, Duluth and Rochester MN, and Kingsford MI. Of 14 processing plants in and adjacent to Wisconsin, the USPS wants to continue full service at only two: Milwaukee and Green Bay.  And the Milwaukee plant is a leased building; the lease is up in 2015; the building is flimsy and not designed for heavy equipment. It shakes alarmingly whenever a train goes by.

USPS is destroying its entire mail-processing infrastructure.

At the same time, private presort houses such as Pitney-Bowes are expanding: building new plants and moving to larger plants.

Your constituents and the American people need your help to stop the destruction of the US Postal Service.

The leadership of the USPS itself wants to self-destruct. Why? Management has been captured by profiteers: the big advertising mailers like Val-Pak coupons—who don’t need first-class service; the big contractors like Pitney Bowes; and competitors like UPS.

If you don’t help to stop them, these profiteers will drive USPS to destruction and insolvency.

USPS is rushing toward privatization of all mail-processing operations.

Once Pitney-Bowes and others have been hired to do all of the mail processing USPS once did (1) the revenue will be gone: taxpayers will again have to pay for letter carriers to deliver mail; (2) there will be no service such as first-class service used to be.

This is not theoretical. It is happening as we speak. There were roughly 500 processing plants just a very few years ago. About half of them have already been closed or are in the process of being closed. The regions that used to be served by the now-closed plants no longer have what we grew up thinking of as first-class mail service. Instead of one-day service to a nearby town, it now takes several days to mail a letter across town.

The “savings” are a fiction. Destroying the service will give the revenue to private operators. Then there will be no revenue to pay for “last mile” delivery.

The purported “savings”—although more than offset by payments to trucking companies and private sorters—are money taken from the postal workers in Madison and other Wisconsin cities (and all across the country) who will lose their livelihoods.

This is the main thrust of the privatizers’ plan: to replace union jobs in the USPS with nonunion jobs at profiteers’ plants: replace living-wage jobs with non-living-wage jobs; replace jobs that offer benefits with jobs without benefits.

Senator Baldwin, what kind of America will you help create?

Will you help the plunderers, privatizers, and profiteers destroy the nation’s infrastructure, in order to destroy the last remaining living-wage, union jobs?

Or will you stand up for the Wisconsin and American people, fight to preserve their post office and to preserve at least a little of the middle class?

When I said to you in June that USPS is being destroyed in the service of the big mailers, what you said to me was, “Some of those mailers are in Wisconsin.”

The implication is that you may be willing to see the permanent destruction of essential American infrastructure; the permanent dismantling of the ability to provide first-class service, so that a Wisconsin corporation can reap more profit.

Who are your constituents? The big mailers? Or the Wisconsin people? You can’t serve both.

You must choose.

Choose to side with the people of Wisconsin and the rest of the country. Choose the middle class. Choose rural communities. Choose people without broadband Internet. Choose the small businesses for whom receiving checks today rather than 2 to 3 business days from now means quick enough cash flow to stay in business.

Privatized mail service, coming to the U.S. with blistering speed, has already happened to Europe, with dire results.

Likewise, closing post offices especially in rural areas devastates the rural communities and saves essentially nothing.

I see that you have not yet signed on as a sponsor of S.316, the Postal Protection Act of 2013. Will you take this first crucial step? Not only sign on, but persuade your colleagues to do so also. Even the Republican ones. Postal service should not be a partisan issue. We all need it. A world without postal service is a poorer world.

S.316 would undo some of the financial damage inflicted by the 2006 PAEA, and would reiterate USPS’s obligation to maintain current levels of service.

Much more must be done to remove the vultures from the postal eagle’s nest. 

For now, will you co-sponsor S.316.

Can I count on your leadership on this crucial issue?

Thomas Ray Worley
worleydervish.blogspot.com/search/label/USPS

Urgent Call to Action: Save First-Class Mail

The management of the US Postal Service has proposed a drastic and irreversible reduction in first-class mail delivery standards. Currently 41.5 percent of first-class mail is delivered in one day, 26.6 percent in two days, and 31.6 percent in three days. The proposal would eliminate one-day delivery altogether. Two-day deliveries would increase to 50.6 percent and three-day to 49.1 percent. The proposed increase in delivery time would be devastating to the many individuals, small businesses, and entrepreneurs who rely on first-class mail.

The proposal, the stated goal of which is to “bring operating costs in line with revenues,” would enable the USPS to eliminate 60 percent of the USPS’s processing-and-distribution plants, purportedly to cut costs. But the presumed savings are actually quite small (only $3 billion, or 4 percent of the USPS’s annual budget). All the mail would still have to be delivered. It would just have to be hauled farther to be processed, thus increasing fuel costs and the commensurate harm to the environment.

The possibility of raising revenues by increasing prices and expanding services is never mentioned. Bowing to pressure from the Direct Marketing Association, the postal service recently withdrew a request for an “exigent rate increase.” The USPS charges direct mailers less than what it costs to deliver their advertising mail, so in essence the direct mailers are stealing from the USPS with each piece of mail they send. Regarding the withdrawal of the proposed rate increase, Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe exclaimed that the direct mailing industry is “way too fragile” to survive a price increase. Clearly, the health of that industry is more important to him than the health of the USPS.

In its projection of the effects of the proposed change in service standards, the USPS does not even mention the American people. It lists only the possible effects on “commercial mailers.” Noncommercial mailers—citizens, entrepreneurs, small businesses, and rural communities—are not given even the slightest consideration.

Because the reduction in service standards would enable the USPS to dismantle its extraordinary processing-and-distribution network, a return to the current service standards would be impossible, thus permanently undermining the USPS’s ability to serve the American people, further reducing mail volume and postal revenues, and further imperiling the US Postal Service itself. The vast majority of the American people won’t fully realize the effects of the proposed reduction in service until it’s too late.

The notice in the Federal Register invites comments from the public between now and October 21, 2011. Letters may be sent to Manager, Industry Engagement and Outreach, United States Postal Service, 475 L’Enfant Plaza, SW – Room 4617, Washington, DC 20260, or e-mailed to industryfeedback@usps.com.

In hopes of gathering more signatures, we have created a petition at Change.org calling for retention of the current first-class service standards. We have less than two weeks to gather as many signatures as possible. Please sign the petition and write your own letter, and ask others to do the same. Once USPS management’s proposal is accepted, there will be no turning back.